Lou Grant

I'm sure some of us on here remember this show well...others may have never heard of it, or even know who the character Lou Grant is (say it ain't so). Anyway, I just discovered these recently on hulu and have been hooked, of course, I'm a 70s TV junkie. This series is actually from the early '80s (when I was about 9 years old) -- a news room drama series.

check it out if you like...here's a link to the episode guide from hulu (first three seasons).

The redhead was decent.
The problem with the show, from an insider's perspective, was that the reporters got too personally involved in every story they wrote. Do a story on a homeless man and spend all your free time trying to find him a place to live. Do a story on a fundraising effort and spend all your free time working for the fundraiser. How about, write the story and move on to the next one.
My friend worked for a caterer and was tending bar at a Hollywood party. Asner was there. My friend asked him for his autograph to give to me.
My friend: "May I have your autograph to give to my friend who is a real journalist?"
Asner: "If your friend is a real journalist, he wouldn't want my autograph."
He was right.

It is a fantastic show. Especially when they tackled very "unsexy" topics like hunger, poverty, Lou going to his old hometown, Charlie's Krishna son, old jazz musicians, old boxers. You check the credits on an old Lou Grant episodes you'll see a ton of people who went on to create dozens of TV shows in the 80s and 90s.

I loved the show, but when it started running I was a high school senior working part time at a small daily and a couple years later I was a college sophomore trying to balance full-time school with a new full-time sports writing job at a 100K. I was leaning toward ditching school anyway, but the last straw was when the school's lone j-prof told us to watch the show because that's the way a newsroom was. Not ... in ... my ... experience. Editors were either crusty or lovable, but never crusty and lovable. I thought Rossi was the most credible character: talented but self-absorbed asshole. We had plenty of those.

Still, the only time I've ever called a TV station to complain about anything was sometime in the mid-1980s when they stopped airing the reruns. The TV woman was polite and said the reruns were too expensive given the small audience they were getting.

I have a video of the first episode, bought it in a store in the mid-1990s. The managing editor, Charlie Hume (Mason Adams), was a buffoon in the first episode and then they made the character a lot more serious. In a later episode, he had flashbacks of being tortured by a Central American regime when he was in a foreign bureau. Asner was really into activism on El Salvador at the time, and some people thought he was forcing his politics down the audience's throats, which led to the show's demise.